GTX 1050 Ti Review: Gaming Graphics Card For the Mass

GTX 1050 Ti is a great graphics card under the budget of Rs 20,000.

The 1000 series of GTX graphics cards are the latest series of gaming graphics cards from Nvidia. Nvidia is the brand, which is always being associated with gaming and the GTX 1050 Ti is the result of the same, which offers a lot of value for money. If you are looking for a decent graphics card, which won't make a dent on your bank balance, then the GTX 1050 Ti is one of those graphics cards, which offers a great value for money.

Design overview

The GTX 1050 Ti that we are reviewing is a mini ATX model, which comes with a single fan. However, just like the ATX model the 1050 Ti has all the ports (o/p). The card has a compact form factor, which can fit easily even on a compact PC compartment.

The GTX 1050 Ti has a single DisplayPort (1.4), full-size HDMI port (2.0) and an old-school DL-DVI port. The card has a PCI 3.0 express slot, which works with the most of the modern day motherboards. The recommended power supply for the graphics card is rated at 300W and it consumes 75W. The card measures at 144.78mm x 111.15mm, which makes it a compact graphics card.

Specifications

The Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti is based on Nvidia's Pascal architecture and offers 768 CUDA cores and 4 GB VRAM (GDDR5). The GPU has a base frequency of 1303 MHz and it can crank up to 1417 MHz. The maximum memory clock speed is rated at 7 Gbps and 128-bit Memory interface width and Memory Bandwidth of 112 GB/sec.

The card supports technologies like CUDA, 3D Vision, PhysX, NVIDIA G-SYNCTM and Ansel. The GPU has a peak GPU temperature of 97-degree centigrade.

After looking at the specifications, one may ask what is CUDA cores and what is VRAM. CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) cores are something similar to the number of cores found on a CPU. More the number of CUDA cores, better the performance. However, that is not the only parameter that one should consider while buying a graphics card. These CUDA cores are invented by Nvidia and only found on the Nvidia graphics cards.

VRAM is also called as Video RAM (Random access memory) which acts as an interface between the monitor and the graphics card. VRAM is also called as specially arranged dynamic VRAM. GPU renders the model and texture data, which is then sent to VRAM. Basically, it acts as a buffer between the GPU and CPU.

GTX 1050 Ti real world usage

We have a top of the line custom made PC with 8 GB LPDDR4x RAM, 128 GB SSD (for OS) 1 TB 7200rpm HDD and a 12 TB 7200rpm HDD. Make sure that you are running on the latest version of Windows 10 OS. For an instance, our PC was running on an older build of Windows 10 and we were not able to update the drivers of the graphics card. However, once we updated the Windows 10 to the latest version the driver was automatically updated.

For gaming, we have the Acer Predator G-Sync enabled monitor with 240 Hz refresh rate, which offers an impressive gaming experience even in the high-frame-rate. Setting up the G-Sync (technology developed by Nvidia to reduce screen tearing while gaming) was a click away.

We tested the GTX 1050 Ti while playing several highly demanding games like Crysis 3, GTA IV, NFC PayBack, and Counter Strike Global Offensive. Each one of these games was playable in medium graphics settings (1920 x 1080px ) resolution, which offers a frame rate near 60fps. Interestingly, we were able to get 100+ fps on CS Go without any problem.

Even with heavy gaming, we did not experience any latency and frame drops (we played some of those games for more than 3 hours continuously) The thermals were in the range. In fact, the temperature did not cross 90-degree centigrade. As our office has air condition set at 22-degree centigrade has also helped in the thermal performance.

As we mentioned earlier, only consider this GPU if you are going for a budget PC as this GPU does not have all the bells and whistles. Ex: This graphics card does not support SLI ( scalable link interface) where it does work if we connect more than one graphics card and this card is not VR-Ready. So, if you are building a VR enabled setup, then get at least the Nvidia GTX 1060. This is a great graphics card for a 1080p gaming setup. However, the performance of the graphics card take a hit in 4K gaming and the frame rate will be less than 60fps.

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